Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
From James Clear's 3-2-1 Email: The work required to be happy, and important lessons that aren't taught in school
... See moreMany people won't attempt something unless they can find an example of someone else who is already doing it. Rely on this type of thinking too much and you'll never do anything interesting.
Your path through life is unique. It is
from nfx.com The AI Spectrum for Founders
Helping Entrepreneurs "Triple, Triple, Double, Double, Double" to a Billion-Dollar Company - Battery Ventures
battery.com
I believe there are seven key phases in SaaS companies’ go-to-market success. I’ve outlined each phase below and hope to elaborate on some of these in later posts and videos. Most of the phases center around a mantra I call “triple, triple, double, double, double”, (T2D3 for short), referring to a company’s annualized revenue growth. (
Every day, we make decisions. These require effort, and there’s probably a finite amount of energy available for these focused choices.
That’s why our digital habits matter. Not to save us five or ten minutes a day, but to save us from a few hundred unimportant decisions that break our flow.
For example, if instead of trying to come up with a unique... See more
That’s why our digital habits matter. Not to save us five or ten minutes a day, but to save us from a few hundred unimportant decisions that break our flow.
For example, if instead of trying to come up with a unique... See more
Digital shortcuts and cognitive load
Most owners consider themselves product creators and not actual business owners.
Superhuman
Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need... See more
sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About
It’s all about the learning. And mediocre successes don’t give you any learning.
Abraham Thomas • Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure
Takeaways:
- Engineers continued to be the predominant function across the first three hires. Not shown in the chart, but 100% of companies hired at least one engineer among their first three hires .
- Interestingly, customer success/support continues to be a popular role for the first three hires. Of the non-engineer hires, almost a quarter of them are
Lenny Rachitsky • Hiring your early team
It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.